Willem Dafoe Quotes
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I don't think people are interested in my personal life. I've never had a Hollywood life. I've always been a worker.
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Performing is about developing empathy, which leads us to a broader view of the world and encourages us to develop compassion; so we can comfort each other and not be so brutal with each other.
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I've never had any close male friends. The most important relationships in my life have always been with women.
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Let's hope I never end up on a deserted island, because I could never make a decision on which three CDs to take with me.
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I think on some level, you do your best things when you're a little off-balance, a little scared. You've got to work from mystery, from wonder, from not knowing.
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If you get stuck and it feels a little stiff, then you do have to mess it up to find it. But other times it's really written and you just stick to your guns and do it as elegantly and as concentrated and as committed as you can.
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When you have something to work with, then you fly with it.
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With theatre, you have to be ready for anything.
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Film is fragmented and gets into lots of other people's hands. There are a lot of pleasures that theatre gives me. You get to perform uninterrupted.
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Usually when you meet with a director, just meeting them after you've seen something you're interested in, they say, "Oh I'd love to work together," and sometimes you never hear from them again.
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I've been in very few flat-out comedies. But I feel like I've always made comedies.
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I set myself challenges every time I work. Ideally I approach everything as though it's the first time - with a beginner's mind and an amateur's love.
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I try to attach myself to people who really inspire me, and directors who are really passionate. That way, I can give myself more fully and trust the impulse behind why the film is being made, and I can be a little more irresponsible in finding out what the character is.
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I don't worry so much about the audience. I want them very much to be involved and enjoy the movie, but I try to just inhabit the character in a full way, where I can create a personal stake.
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The worst thing is to get involved with people who aren't passionate about what they're doing.
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I'm no different to anyone else; I want people to like me. I just don't particularly want them to understand me.
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Sometimes you feel like you have to do research to make something, other times you know you don't feel it so much.
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Central to being an actor is pretending, and the adventure of it all. That's why you become a junkie for different kinds of situations.
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The Midwest isn't somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting.
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It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains.
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Plenty of bad movies are very successful, and plenty of good movies are not. And distribution is so crazy, some films won't even get their day in court.
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It's no fun for an actor to keep repeating what you did before. It's always changing. I'm changing. The target keeps moving. That's the beauty of it.
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I have some sort of affinity for compulsive behavior. The most interesting stories come up from the people on the outside. They don't waste energy marching to the same drummer most of us do. It gives us an opportunity to look at things in a different way, which is the purest thing cinema can do.
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I like to work with people of different cultures, different points of view. But yeah, I feel much more comfortable. That's the problem I sometimes have with going to Hollywood. I feel like they don't share the same values as I do. They aren't interested in the same things. It's not always true, but sometimes, I feel it deeply, because as an industry, they celebrate things that I'm less interested in, and it's all about the business.